What are the best practices for training agents on upselling and cross-selling skills?

This is a great recommendation. Knowing your customer and their needs, is the strongest tool you will ever have in sales. With a majority of the people that I have trained, I have used a modified version of the Socratic method of sales. This allows you to identify the opportunities a customer has for your products or services as well as eliminating options that would not be suitable for them. When you tailor the experience of a sale to the customer by utilizing the personal details that they have shared, your odds of success greatly increase. Empathy is your strongest soft skill when it comes to sales. Your ability to relate to the customer and see things from their perspective, is vital and crucial.

As soon as you begin your relationship with an existing customer, stay up to date on their current goals and challenges. That way, when new product features are released that align with your customers' needs, you can provide an overview to gather their interest.

In my Renewal experience, it was as simple as building rapport with the customer and making sure to listen and understand the customers needs. By heading into the discussion, focused on retaining the existing business, I can then pivot to making sure that they were aware of our other services. I first focused on what mattered which was the renewal of their existing business. After securing the renewal we could then bring to their attention the other areas of the business that they might not have known we had. For example with GoToMeeting I was focused on the Communication and Collaboration tools; that didn't mean that I forgot to mention the Identity and Access Management or the Customer Engagement and Support tools as well.

This is the base for starting any great sales relationship. The aim is to find someone’s “true motivation.” Their emotional buying response. It takes peeling back their layers with meaningful and probing questions. More often than not you won’t find this with the first one or two questions! Keep digging.

Call scripts should help guide you, but make sure to incorporate your speaking style into it. Practice and make changes to feel more comfortable when talking to different customers. Also, ask coworkers to help you perform mock upsell conversations. It's important to get feedback from others before you start taking on real upsell or cross-sell opportunities.

If you want agents to work hard on upsells and cross-sells, you need to compensate accordingly. If you offer commission for upsells, agents will be more motivated to do so. This will motivate agents to want to improve their skills, and make it easier for you to provide constructive feedback. Think about creating a President's Club program to drive sales/upsells/cross-sells across the department. Top performers can win a vacation for themselves and a guest.

It's important to start small and simple. Create a cross-selling scenario that is easy to follow and provides agents opportunities for quick wins. The incentive plan also needs to be clear, concise, and provide close to real time gratification. The key to any cross-selling initiative is to obtain buy-in from the team. Once victories are witnessed, momentum can spread quickly.

Role-playing is a great way to learn upsell/cross-sell skills. Have seasoned agents act as customers while newer agents try to upsell/cross-sell. This will help them build their skills quickly. You can start by breaking up the conversation into multiple parts to help new agents focus on each part.

I strongly believe in fostering community within your team. I strongly believe in creating a buddy system in your team for new agents to learn from seasoned agents. This also provides new agents to offer their perspectives on process improvements.

Sales can be taught and the human skills (I am with Simon Sinek in I do not like the phrase of soft skills) are skills that everyone can use throughout their entire life as well as their career. If leadership does not have a budget to bring in a coach then you can start by building an internal SWAT team. Look for your consistent high performers and identify those that are higher on the empathy scale. The reason I say consistent with higher empathy is because they are often your best teacher as opposed to the rock star with a high ego. Get the quality and leadership teams to buy in work and work with your targeted peer leaders on examples and how to present the tools to other agents. Monitor the results and tweak as necessary.

One thing I've found helpful is that the training mirrors the sales process. Whatever that process looks like for the company, the training should follow the same methods and flow.